Artist’s Theory Gets the Brushoff

--Was it possible? Could the enigmatic “Mona Lisa” immortalized by Leonardo da Vinci really be Da Vinci himself? No way, say art experts unmoved by the theory of artist Lillian Schwartz in Arts & Antiques magazine that the artist and model were one and the same. “We consider it to be a lot of nonsense and not worth the time to discuss it,” said a spokeswoman for the European Paintings Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I think it’s nonsense, completely,” said James Beck, chairman of the Art History Department at Columbia University and author of a book on Italian Renaissance painting. “Every artist paints images that look, to a certain extent, like him. That’s a truism in art.” Schwartz, who won an Oscar for special effects for the movie “Lathe of Heaven,” said she juxtaposed on a computer the famous painting, finished in 1517, with a mirrored image of a Da Vinci self-portrait from 1518. “The image taking shape before me was a single face,” Schwartz wrote in the magazine.

--The real King Kong would never have suffered the indignity, but two men aping the famous beast had to be rescued by the Fire Department when they became stuck on the top of a theater marquee. The men, dressed as gorillas as a promotional stunt for the movie “King Kong Lives,” had climbed atop the marquee at an Albany, Ore., movie theater to pose for pictures. The ladder they had used to make their climb was then taken inside so it would not show in the pictures. The door of the theater closed, locking automatically, with the keys inside. But when the Fire Department arrived, there was one more hitch. “They told me it was not their policy to unlock the building unless the owner was present--and I was stuck on top of the marquee,” said Tim Moyer, the theater owner and one of the make-believe apes. “It was really embarrassing.”

--A major collection of documents of the English Romance poets, including the largest set of autographed letters by Percy Bysshe Shelley, has been donated to the New York Public Library. The collection, known to scholars as “Shelley and His Circle,” was donated to the library by the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation. “The collection is conservatively appraised in excess of $20 million,” said Mayor Edward I. Koch. “But its value as a scholarly resource is absolutely priceless.” The collection of 8,000 manuscripts and 13,000 printed volumes features many of the writings of Lord Byron, including his love letters, and a lock of hair that belonged to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the poet’s second wife and the author of “Frankenstein.”